Category Archives: Exnihilism

Crossing design with Kabbalah

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

  • Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
  • Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
  • Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
  • Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
  • Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
  • Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
  • Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

Continue reading Crossing design with Kabbalah →

Olamot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.

What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.

What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.

What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.

What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.

Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.

Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.

Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.

Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.

Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.

Quantlocked

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.

An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.

Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.

Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!

So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.

And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)

With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.

Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.

Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.

Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.

I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…

…

Oh.

Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.

It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.

Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.

Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.

Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.

Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.

The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.

This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.

And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.

Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.

No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.

Topology of mystery

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.

Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.

We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.

But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.

The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.

The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.

And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.

The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.

Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.

Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.

Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.

Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.

Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.

In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.

Sense, common and uncommon

Design, Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.

Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.

Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.

These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.

Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.

Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.

The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.

And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.

(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)

Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.

We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.

And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.

And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.

What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?

(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)

I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.

We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).

But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.

The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.

We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.

It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.

Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.

The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.

What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.

Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.

It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.

Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.

And design is how I put my religious life into practice.

Design! Jewish! Not religious!

Not to you. Not yet.

Exnihilist manifesto, opening?

Exnihilism, Philosophy

Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.

But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.

Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.

Kabbalistic everso

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).

Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.

For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.

Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.

Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.

Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.

To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.

Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.

Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.

Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.

Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.

What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.

Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.

The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.

Exnihilist maxims

Exnihilism

Meaning irrupts precisely from nothingness, nowhere, never.

Nil and inconceivability are indistinguishable.

Impossibility and inconceivable possibility are indistinguishable.

Meaninglessness and inconceivable meaning are indistinguishable.

Nonexistence and inconceivable being are indistinguishable.

To finite beings like us, infinity seems less than zero.

Our comprehension can only grasp what we can conceive. Only forms can be conceived.

Meaning flows infraformally and supraformally. The Midas touch of objectivity freezes meaning solid in universal form.

Neshamah Yisrael

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle.

Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo.

Ex nihilo – from Nothing.

Nothingness is precisely the aperture through which incomprehensible meaning floods into the world from Beriah.

A gift of Beriah, once received, annihilates our naive misconception of nothingness.

Never again can we take nothingness at face value and confuse it with mere absence.

Never again can we experience nothingness without anticipation and hope.

Nothingness is Ayin, the divine naught who protects our eyes from the divine light of infinite intensity.

Ayin is the blessed blindness who shields us from what we are unprepared to witness.

We are oblivious to such realities, and to us they are nothing, until they become givens – gifts.

Meaning enters the world through Ayin.

Once we know this from the heart, in faith, we are exnihilists – we can no longer see nothingness without knowing how it conceals, and how it may, at any moment, reveal.

Shema, Neshamah Yisrael.

Exnihilist light

Exnihilism

Forms are objective. All content of experience is form. Things as perceived by our senses are form. Ideas conceived by our mind are form. To our naive experience everything seems to be material and ideal objects, which is why we say things are “objectively real”, known in “objective truth”. In actuality, they are all formed from infraformal material, and could be formed otherwise.

Formation is subjective. Formation is “unconscious” not because it is submerged or suppressed objective content but because its essence defies the grasp of consciousness in the exactly same way perception is imperceptible as an object of perception.

Across formations strange events occur. Epiphanies irrupt out of oblivion, ex nihilo. Superformal meaning floods into the world.

A heart pumps light through vessels of clear reception and veins of pure service.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Pascal’s Wager 2.0

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:

  • If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
  • If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.

Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.

Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.

Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.

But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.

Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.

But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?

In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?

So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.

  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
  • If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:

Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.

This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.

Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:

To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.

I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it…

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.

Manifesto as genre

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Polycentrism

I find the manifesto an attractive genre.

Most persuasive writing takes disagreement or indecision as its point of departure. Not the manifesto. A manifesto assumes agreement or at least sympathy and persuades toward full embrace and action.

A good manifesto activates an egregore.

One other winning characteristic of the manifesto is its brevity, which makes it eminently letterpressable and chapbookable. I have at least two manifestos I could write:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto — Reality is morally meaningful and you know it. And reality is pregnant with surprise.
  • Polycentrist Manifesto — The world we inhabit is one of myriad experiential and agential subjective centers. We should not be naively ego-centric, nor naively other-centric. We should polycenter ourselves. Empathy, the Golden Rule, law and principles are indispensable to polycentered life.

An attempt to unfold the Sefirot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Judaism

People have asked me to explain the Sefirot. It is not something that can be explained. It is not an object of knowledge. The Sefirot must be entered and known-from. It is a subject of study.

The sefirot is the crystallization of a Jewish esoteric enworldment. First, it must be understood from a panentheistic perspective that situates all that can be given as real within a divine beyond-being that is essentially unknowable. However, this beyond-being occasionally births surprising new being from its own (apparent) Nothingness. Until we intuit and internalize this situation, none of the rest of the Sefirot can unfold in understanding. It remains a welter and waste of symbols — a perplexity that makes even simple ignorance seem lucid by comparison. But once this panentheistic enception is born in us, the understanding erupts forth and embraces the world, infusing it with meaning — or rather, revealing the meaning inherent within reality. We suddenly feel the necessity of balance in apparent opposites. We know that love without limits and limits without love destroy both self and other. We sense that unconstrained progress and static stability destroy all possibility of living, steady improvement. We recognize that tradition and institution must perpetually reform in order to live, and that these are needed for meaningful life.

Once this enworldment becomes given truth for us — once it isn’t a doctrinal fact-system, but a faith — a glance at the Sefirot is a prayer. We might be diffused by practical life, scattered, made vague and dull. But with a comprehending glance, lightning strikes from above and below, connecting above and below, with a flash of ascending and descending light. Descending: Where are you? Ascending: Here I am.

A sacred symbol is a visual prayer.

Ein sof – Unbounded – Unknowable, infinite beyond-being. To us, pregnant Nothingness — inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

Keter – Crown – Finitude. The possibility of finite being, defined against but devoted to infinite beyond-being. The inner surface of tzimtzum. To us, the principle of panentheism.

Chokhmah – Wisdom – Intuition of All, as yet enfolded, undeveloped, charged with potential. To us, the flash of knowing, preceding knowledge. Enception.

Binah – Understanding – Unfolding knowledge. Alchemical “adaptation”. To us, intelligibility. Conception.

Chesed – Love – Grace, mercy, lovingkindness. Self-transcending We.

Gevurah – Power – Limitation, boundary, law. Self-defining Me/Us.

Tif’eret – Beauty – Balance, harmony, perfection, completeness, rightness. The bringing together of difference into wholeness.

Netsach – Eternity – Agency, initiative, command. Compulsion to take action, challenge, innovate, effect change.

Hod – Splendor – Devotion, receptivity, obedience. Inclination to accept, respond, participate, shelter, conserve.

Yesod – Foundation – Establishment, tradition, teaching and learning, dynamic stability.

Malchut – Kingdom – Meaningful world. Divine presence in given reality. Also, Shekinah, divine feminine.

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Exnihilist Manifesto

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.

I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.

What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.

It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.

But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.

In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.

The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.

We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.

Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.

If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.

If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.

If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.

If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.

If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.

If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.

If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.

If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.

Nothingness is dreadful.

It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.

Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.

If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.

It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.

How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?

The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.

Exnihilist declaration

Exnihilism, Judaism

When you stare out into death and don’t attempt to project an afterlife into it — when you let it be sheer nothingness, Ein Sof — God comes to you from nothingness, ex nihilo, and blesses your life with new meaning.

Even if you cannot know or feel the truth of this declaration, it is real, and it is waiting for your wordless choice.

Block

Autobiography, Exnihilism

I’m really struggling. I have a sprawling multi-volume book in my mind and I can’t get it out. It’s that genre and voice problem again. It took me almost two decades years to get nine pages into an acceptable form. But I have 991 pages still jammed up in there.

Susan suggested that maybe I write what I have to say as chapbooks, maybe they’ll coagulate into an actual book. Or maybe they’ll expand into respectable-length essays that could be published as a collection.

I do find it inspiring, though, to think of what I’m doing as making pretty books — physical artifacts made out of ideas, words, letters, layouts, paper, ink and thread. I love the object-quality of books.

Three chapbooks I could get out are:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto
  • Shells and Pearls
  • Enworldment